The president of Iceland – Guoni Th. Johannesson – has strong feelings on the subject of pizza toppings, according to Visier, an Icelandic language news site as relayed via the Huffington Post.
Specifically, he loathes pizza with pineapple.
In fact, he told a bunch of high school students, if he could pass a law banning pineapple on pizza, he would do so
Which, he added quickly, he cannot do because he cannot pass laws. In fact, he told the CBC show As It Happens: “I am glad I do not hold such power. Presidents should not have unlimited power. I would not want to hold this position if I could pass laws forbidding that which I don’t like. I would not want to live in such a country.”
Hey, my kind of president! From your lips, President Johannesson, to the ears of another president I could mention.
Plus, of course, Johannesson is absolutely right. Pineapple on pizza is an abomination. In fact, I’m inclined to think that pineapple – particularly those canned, syrupy rings that became inexplicably popular in the 1950s – should be deemed unfit for human consumption. Even today one can find on the internets recipes for (and hideous pictures of) innocent hams drenched in pineapple syrup and festooned with rings of pineapples and maraschino cherries fastened to the sad roast with toothpicks.
I’ll concede that Johannesson’s culinary taste isn’t perfect. He would replace pineapples on pizzas not with sausage and peppers and mushrooms – as God decreed – but with seafood. I suppose that’s not surprising, though, when we consider that fish make up more than 40 percent of the tiny island nation’s exports.
I suspect that the current occupant of our White House wouldn’t like either pineapple or seafood on his pizza. In fact, pizza is not listed among his favorite foods. Perhaps that’s because he’s still smarting from the mockery he endured in 2011 when he, a native New Yorker met Sarah Palin in the city during her overhyped “One Nation” bus tour. (Remember that? Fun times!)
They got together at the Famous Famiglia Pizzeria in Times Square, and – in a now notorious photo op – decorously ate their pie with knives and forks.
Hilarity ensued, particularly on the part of late night comics and millions of other native (and adopted) New Yorkers. There were endless discussions of how to fold the slice to make it easier to grasp and bite. Now, when Donald Trump does eat pizza, he has a new and novel approach to it. He carefully scrapes off the cheese and other toppings and eats them, leaving the naked and exposed crust to be dumped in the trash.
For generations, the eating habits of American politicians – especially presidents and those aspiring to the presidency – have been regularly scrutinized and often held up to public scorn.
Remember during the last campaign when John Kasich’s habit of cramming food into his mouth was widely ridiculed, especially by Trump? And truthfully, while Kasich might be a good man, a great husband and father and all that, it did sort of look as if he was about to lower his head to the plate and start shoveling the food in.
The latest fun food topic for reporters with way too much time on their hands is to compare the eating habits of our last president with those of the current one.
Barack Obama, of course, was widely seen as a fastidious eater of overall healthy food, even if he did periodically sneak away with Joe Biden to indulge his passion for cheeseburgers and fries. Other than that, he stuck to healthy meals like salmon laden with veggies from Michelle’s garden, and his between-meal snacks – kept in bowls in the Oval Office – consisted mainly of apples and trail mix. He’d take a break on his Hawaiian vacations, when he and the family would treat themselves to traditional shave ice, flavored with fruit syrups.
Trump, though? Not so healthy, not by a long shot. Melania may have ordered that Michelle’s vegetable garden is to be preserved, but little of its bounty is likely to end up on her husband’s plate. He is said to be nuts about Lay’s Potato Chips and Oreo cookies, washed down with Diet Coke and followed by cherry vanilla ice cream.
The portly and exercise-averse septuagenarian is also a devotee of McDonald’s, KFC and Wendy’s when traveling, proclaiming often that their products are unlikely to contain contaminants. Really. And his idea of a great breakfast is bacon and “over-well” cooked eggs. For dinner, he’s a steak and potato man, which is to say several helpings of potatoes gratin, usually baked with cream and cheese, and steak cooked so thoroughly “it would rock on the plate,” his long-time Mar-a-Lago butler told the New York Times.
And his premiere meal, his all-time favorite? Meatloaf, especially when made according to a family recipe. It’s on the menu at the Mar-a-Lago Club as well as the White House. (Just a week ago Trump insisted that Chris Christie order it. Apparently, the New Jersey governor is still lining up for Trumpian abuse.) It is said that Trump’s sister, a respected federal judge, makes it for him on his birthday.
It appears that in his food preferences, as in so much else in life, Trump yearns for those halcyon days of the 1950s and ’60s. That’s amazing when you consider that, in the last 50 or so years, American cooking, spurred on by James Beard, Julia Child, Alice Waters and their devoted disciples, has undergone a genuine revolution in ingredients, cooking styles and recipes.
But that cornucopia of truly spectacular foodstuffs has yet to make it to Trump World.
Pineapple pizza, often dubbed Hawaiian pizza, is not from the Aloha State at all. It was invented – according the know-it-all Atlas Obscura – in a small city on Ontario, Canada, by a bored Greek immigrant back in 1962. And that’s in Trump’s golden age for food.
Given Donald’s apparent lack of interest in pizzas, I doubt that the White House chefs will have to hang up their whisks and stow their souffle dishes and start rolling out pineapple pizzas.
But – you knew there was a “but” here – pineapples, the chosen fruit of the 1950s, infested more than pizzas. How long will it be before a once-wholesome ham sadly studded with sweet pineapple rings and maraschino cherries shows up on the menu for an official State Dinner?
(“Monitor” columnist Katy Burns lives in Bow.)